Mark Rowe

Mark Rowe prints things the size of buildings. His company wrapped three city blocks of downtown Atlanta and, more recently, the room this podcast is recorded in.

Rowe and Brad Banyas knew each other twenty years ago in corporate America and then did not speak, except that Banyas wished him happy birthday on LinkedIn every year and Rowe never wrote back. Rowe kept watching what he posted anyway. When the studio needed building out, Banyas called him, and Rowe took a blank room with a dark hole of a back wall and two weeks. He was then the first guest recorded in it, which he pointed out on air.

The wall behind them is fabric, not vinyl, stretched into track with beads so there is not a seam or a wrinkle in it, and it comes down and rolls up into a small bag when the graphic needs changing. The photographs are direct printed onto brushed aluminum and cut out on a CNC. Rowe started in a thousand square feet in 2006 and now has twenty thousand and three million dollars of printing equipment, which he buys new so nothing goes down. The shop prints overnight. It turns a tour bus in twenty four hours, which is how Zac Brown's first VIP dinner trailer, P Diddy, Wu Tang Clan and Karol G all got wrapped. The biggest job he has done is the Georgia Aquarium parking deck, where the whale shark banner runs three hundred and thirty three feet by sixty. He helped install it himself, white knuckling it up on the lift.

The first year nearly took everything, and then he gave up the rest of it himself. The rental properties went, the houses, the cars, and finally his place to live. For the second and third years of the business he slept on an air mattress under his work table with banners hung around the sides so nobody could see it, showered at LA Fitness, and was back at the office before the first employee arrived every single morning. He has said yes to projects he had no idea how to execute and then figured them out afterward, starting with the W Hotels in Midtown and Buckhead, where he walked out of the meeting and called his 3M rep to ask how.

The work runs on favors he has earned rather than capacity he owns. The sign company behind the desk is booked two to three months out; Rowe calls the owner and has it the next day. That same shop built six Las Vegas style signs over a weekend when he found out five days beforehand that they had to be in Vegas for the Super Bowl. Fourteen employees now, after six months ago cutting loose one toxic one. His father's advice, when the money got thin, was to go sell more.